by Jennifer Smith, CommonWealth Beacon
September 29, 2026
MASSACHUSETTS VOTERS LOOK like they’ve largely made up their minds on two of the highest-profile questions on the November ballot. They seem on track to retain legalized recreational marijuana and a sweeping new gun law passed in 2024, according to a new poll.
In a MassINC Polling Group survey (Toplines | Crosstabs) for CommonWealth Beacon, attitudes toward the other seven ballot questions were more mixed, with percentages of likely voters saying they expect to vote yes hovering in the high 40s and low 50s.
But the two final questions on the ballot are bucking that trend. Sixty-one percent of likely voters said they would vote no on Question 8, which if approved would end legal sales of recreational marijuana and create civil penalties for possessing more than a small amount of recreational cannabis. Twenty-seven percent of respondents said they would vote yes.
Question 9, a referendum on whether to keep the state's sweeping 2024 firearms law, looks set for a resounding affirmation of the law, with 70 percent of respondents saying they would vote to keep it and 18 percent saying they would repeal it.
These two are also the questions voters seem most sure about, with just 11 percent of voters undecided on each. That is the lowest undecided share of any of the nine questions on the ballot.
"People don't want to go backwards on these two things," said Steve Koczela, president of the MassINC Polling Group.
“They might not love the Legislature,” Koczela said of voters, pointing to their strong support two years ago for a ballot question to audit lawmakers. “But they approve of what the Legislature did on firearms, at least.”
The survey of 800 likely voters was conducted online September 14 through 22. It has a credibility interval of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Question 1, which would apply the public records law to the Legislature and governor's office, has the support of 63 percent of respondents with 14 percent opposed. That’s lower than the support seen in a UMass Amherst/WCVB poll in August, which found 84 percent support for the measure with just 7 percent opposed.
The public records question is considered a natural heir to state Auditor Diana DiZoglio’s successful ballot push last cycle to allow her office to audit the Legislature. That audit attempt, which the Legislature has vocally resisted, is stuck in a political and legal morass at the moment.
The CommonWealth Beacon survey asked voters to name their top issues at the ballot box in their own words. When the polling group reviewed those answers, guns and marijuana were the only ballot questions people cited as reasons to get out and vote.
“Those are your two marquee ones that were actually drawing people out," said MPG vice president Rich Parr.
In 2016, nearly 54 percent of Massachusetts voters approved legalizing recreational marijuana. A decade later, they are being asked to become the first state to dismantle the market. The repeal campaign is led by the Coalition for a Healthy Massachusetts and is backed by the national anti-legalization group Smart Approaches to Marijuana, which is funding a similar effort in Maine.
The ballot question would still allow adults 21 and older to possess up to one ounce of pot without criminal penalty, and it would leave the state's medical marijuana law in place.
Question 9 is a veto referendum, a mechanism that lets voters decide whether to keep a law the Legislature has already passed. The 2024 law cracked down on ghost guns and 3-D printed guns, strengthened the state's red flag law, and expanded the definition of assault weapons, among other changes. Gun rights groups gathered enough signatures to force a referendum but missed the window for the 2024 ballot.
Most of the other seven questions still lean toward a win, but by less, and with 20 to 25 percent of voters still undecided. That puts them in “kind of a gray area where it really could move,” said Parr.
Question 6, which would create a conservation fund that would still depend on legislative appropriation, has 56 percent support to 24 percent opposition.
Four questions failed to crack 50 percent support in the poll, or just made it over that line, which public opinion experts and ballot question veterans agree leaves the campaigns on shaky ground.
“It's different than a candidate poll where the margin is the best predictor,” Koczela said. In ballot questions, “the yes percent tends to be the best predictor. And if you have a yes percent that's right around 50, then you're watching nervously.” What's more, pollsters generally expect undecided voters on ballot questions to break toward the status quo.
Most of the ballot campaign money tends to be spent between Labor Day and Election Day, Koczela noted, and “you do kind of see support move the most just in the last eight to 10 weeks.”
On Question 4, allowing Election Day voter registration, yes holds the lead, 53 percent to 33 percent. Question 7, which lowers the lot size requirements to build single-family homes, has support at 51 percent and opposition at 24 percent.
Question 2, letting Committee for Public Counsel Services employees unionize, fell below half support, with yes in the lead, 48 percent to 25 percent. Question 5, rewriting the state's revenue cap, is also narrowly below majority support, with 47 percent in favor and 26 percent opposed.
Apart from the two repeal efforts, Question 3 to create all-party primaries looks most endangered, even as the margin stays close. It had the support of 43 percent of likely voters, with 36 percent opposed and 20 percent undecided.
Despite the record-tying number of questions, and the irritation from Beacon Hill with advocates doing an end-run around the usual legislative process, voters aren’t eager to hand over their direct democracy leverage.
More than three-quarters of respondents said “it is a good thing for the voters to decide these issues” and just 15 percent said lawmakers should be deciding more of them.
With nine questions on the ballot, the pollsters said the usual rules may not apply. Campaigns will compete with one another for attention, which could blunt opposition spending.
"The numbers may be more sticky than they usually are," Koczela said. “Or some of these undecideds might just not have heard about the ballot question and might be very persuadable."
Many of those undecided voters face unfamiliar subjects, he noted.
"Some of these are esoteric issues," Koczela said. ”They're not all things like marijuana legalization."
This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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